Posted tagged ‘Luxury automobiles’

Eric Roston, author of the new and invaluable The Carbon Age, has done well, very well, in a two step sequence.

Step one: receive an intelligent and positive cite in Time Magazine for his book on the singular importance and dangers of element number 6. If you want to understand the basics and real significance of climate change, read Eric’s book.

For some reason, perhaps because he has shifted his substance abuse from prescription narcotics to petroleum, Rush seems to hate the free market that has driven oil prices up — and hence, as every ec. 101 textbook will tell you — has shifted behavior among energy consumers. He would rather, as Eric writes in his brutally funny response to Rush, support the vicious, dictatorial states and sponsors of terrorism that own so much of the world’s oil than see his fellow Americans reduced to riding bicycles or taking the bus.

This tempest in a teapot (dome?) illustrates a point this blog tries to make over and over again. It pays to be able to do the numbers. We all know that price changes alter consumer choices. We know that oil in particular and energy in general is traded in a global market. We know, or should, about the concept of peak oil . We can reason our way to the likely impact that increased demand and slowing then reversing production increases will have on our energy mix, our economy, and the wealth of nations. Rush can play a farcical King Canute as long as he wants, but he can no more hold back the flow of numbers, of the hard fact of supply and demand than the old Dane could restrain the tide.

The oddity in all this — or perhaps the revealing detail, is that Rush’s rhetoric is his usual song to the common man. But, as we learn here, there is a simpler reason to explain his howls of pain and rage at the thought of 4 buck a gallon gas that has nothing to do with any notional common touch. The old deaf (recovering, we hope) drug addict drives himself around in a Maybach 57S — no doubt a truly wonderful automobile. It must hurt, however, even for a man as rich as Limbaugh, to fill the tank of a $450,000 behemoth that scores 10 miles to the gallon in the city.